Social Mobility in Boston?

EVERY WEEK BRINGS NEWS of more Cambridge families being forced out of the city, to be replaced by the students and young professionals who are attracted by Cambridge's youth-oriented atmosphere but who leave the area after a year or two. Across the river in Boston, Charles River Park houses these same young transients in an area that until a decade ago was the West End, a stable, predominantly Italian tenement neighborhood.

Do these trends indicate that society in Boston--and throughout America--is becoming more rootless? Definitely not, answers Professor Stephan Thernstrom in his most recent book, The Other Bostonians. America has always been an extremely fluid society, even including its non-growing Eastern cities such as Boston. While 19th century transients may on the whole have been lower on the social ladder than their present-day counterparts, they were at least as numerous.

Thernstrom contends that this fluidity has been a factor contributing to what he found to be a surprisingly high degree of social mobility in Boston. His exhaustive research shows that during the last century, blue-collar workers were able to make moderate gains in economic status throughout their careers. Their children were much less likely than the children of white-collar workers to begin or end careers at white-collar jobs, but even so, 40 per cent of all blue-collar sons finished their careers in white-collar jobs. Thernstrom concludes:

If Horatio Alger's novels were designed to illustrate the possibility not of rags-to-riches but of rags-to-respectability, as I take them to have been, they do not offer wildly misleading estimates of the prospects for mobility open to Americans.

Thernstrom's research effort was gargantuan. Information from city directories, the U.S. Census, old tax records, among other sources was analyzed by computer. Where the mass of information was too great to be considered as a whole, he considered random samples of Boston residents and closely studied their careers and those of their children. The result is eminently readable, but also imparts an aura of impartiality that is missing from most non-quantitative social histories. Judgments concerning the fairness of social systems may vary considerably, but the degree of social mobility in a community is quantifiable. Thernstrom has made a large contribution toward determining the extent of that mobility in Boston.

Much of The Other Bostonians is devoted to discovering why social mobility is greater among some groups than among others. Although children of white-collar parents are much more likely to be upwardly mobile than are those from blue-collar families, social origin alone was insufficient to explain the social mobility apparent in Thernstrom's statistics.

ONE GROUP which had trouble adjusting to the social system of Boston and which played a prominent role in that system was foreign immigrants. Three-quarters of all Boston residents in the first decade of this century were either foreign-born or had foreign-born parents. They were much less likely to be upwardly mobile than were native Americans, even those Americans who had emigrated to Boston from rural areas of New England.

While the difficulties faced by most foreign immigrants and their descendants lessened in time, certain ethnic groups were much less able than others to adapt to Boston, and found themselves stuck at the bottom of the economic ladder. The Irish and the Italians were distinctly less upwardly mobile than other immigrant groups. On the other hand, 75 per cent of all second-generation Russian-Americans--many of whom were Jewish--finished their careers in white collar jobs.

Thernstrom discounted actual and structural discrimination as a major cause of low upward mobility among certain ethnic groups, because discrimination was generally experienced equally by most ethnic groups, and only some of the groups lacked upward mobility.

Similarly, while rural backgrounds may have hindered Irishmen in their attempts to adjust to urban life, migrants from rural America had little difficulty adjusting. And the Irish at least had the advantage over other European groups of not having to adjust to a new language. What is more, many second-generation immigrants in Boston also had low upward mobility, and they grew up in an urban environment. Also, Thernstrom demonstrates that the degree of upward mobility within an ethnic group is unrelated to the extent that the group is segregated from the rest of society.

Although successful at pointing out weaknesses in others' theories concerning upward mobility among ethnic groups. Thernstrom is less successful at suggesting alternative theories. He contends that some aspect of Irish culture or Roman Catholic doctrine discourages Irishmen from striving to achieve material success and from investing in their children's education. Yet, as Thernstrom admits, such a theory explains little. Instead of looking for the reasons Irishmen held these values, the theory uses the fact that the Irish moved up the occupational scale less rapidly than other groups as "proof" simply that they did hold to such principles.

THERNSTROM'S LONGEST chapter deals the social mobility of blacks in Boston. Although blacks first began coming to Boston in large numbers after the Civil War, they were confined almost exclusively to unskilled service jobs until 1940, when their upward mobility began to increase slightly.

Thernstrom criticizes most current theories of the lack of social mobility. His study showed that blacks with urban backgrounds fared no better than those with rural backgrounds; blacks on the average received at least as many years of education as more-successful immigrant groups; many ethnic groups were more segregated from the rest of society than were blacks; and black families until quite recently rarely fit Daniel Moynihan's matriarchal stereotype. He concludes that low social mobility among blacks resulted partially from "the nature of black culture," but mostly from discrimination.

Thernstrom's argument becomes most shaky when he concludes that Boston, although unique in its age and distance from the frontier, is similar to the vast majority of American cities in its degree of social mobility. He claims that the similar occupational structures in most American cities, plus the great fluidity of the national population throughout the last century have resulted in uniform rates of social mobility.

The ethnic mixes of major American cities vary considerably, so it seems somewhat dubious to argue that rates of social mobility are uniform in all cities, at the same time that one studies varying rates of social mobility among different ethnic groups. Unfortunately, very little research of the type attempted by Thernstrom has ever been done in other cities. Social history is indebted to Thernstrom for his groundbreaking effort in the study of American social mobility; future studies should determine whether or not his optimistic conclusions concerning upward mobility of lower economic classes apply nation-wide.